Matched by Ally Condie

[katekintailbc]

Matched
by Ally Condie
(Audio)

This is the story of Cassia, a young girl living in a highly regulated dystopia who attends her matching ceremony and finds her best partner in all of their society is her friend, Xander. Such a moment of great fortune at the beginning of a book can only mean chaos and catastrophe are soon to follow.

Indeed, it seems that her real match should have been a boy named Ky. However, he is unable to be matched because of family history. It starts her wondering, however, and such is the stirring of discovery that fuels one's typical "main character bucks the dystopian system" story.

Really, this has all the characteristics of a good YA book--characters you care about, a creative and complex society/culture, mysterious happenings, and a love triangle. However, it fell short of really captivating me. I felt like the main character spent too much time jumping out of the story in order to literally explain how her world worked to me. I prefer books where we're shown things and the reader is seamlessly integrated into the lifestyle. I didn't really want or need Cassia to keep telling me about her world every time we got to a little detail; I wanted to see it and figure it out for myself.

The love triangle and antagonist both felt to me like other books I'd read before, so they didn't offer many surprises.

I did very much like the society, don't get me wrong. The idea that people are given small jobs to do so that no one person is able to do everything for themselves without the reliance on society as a whole is a brilliant place to play and explore (quite nightmarish, from our point of view). And I like the idea of being matched, taking all the guesswork out of finding "the one." However, there are so many awful parts of society--so much control, putting people to sleep at 80 years of age. There are lots of pros and cons, lots of good and bad. It's fascinating.

And the characters were good; I liked them very much. But Cassia was so integrated into her society and neither the match nor her grandfather's poetry really made me understand why she would start questioning things. If she hadn't, there wouldn't be much of a book, certainly. But I just didn't realize she was such a curious sort of person. It was hard for me to buy into for a while.

That being said, I really enjoyed the 100 songs and 100 books and 100 poems that society chose. And the fact that you can buy more on the black market or hold onto items ("artifacts") from the past. The author certainly chose some wonderful poems, especially the Dylan Thomas ones.

I do look forward to finding out what happens in the sequel (more raging against the dying of the light, I suspect), but I'm not going to rush right out and find it.